Chapter 6
Chapter Six
The hot water hit her shoulders, and she braced both hands against the tile and let it.
The cold from the sprinklers had done real damage.
Not the kind anyone could see—no bruises, no visible injury, nothing that would show up on a scan.
But every joint in her body had seized in the thirty minutes between the sprinkler water and the hotel lobby.
Her knees, her hips, the small bones of her wrists.
Cold was always the worst. Cold turned her body into something brittle and uncooperative, and the walk here had cost her more than she’d let show.
The heat found the worst of it first. Her left knee, which had been screaming since the pivot on the warehouse floor.
Her right shoulder, where something deep in the socket had gone tight and wrong during the crowd surge outside.
The low ache in her spine that lived there most days but had sharpened into something that made her want to curl into a ball on the shower floor and not move for an hour.
She stayed under the water and let it work. Steam filled the bathroom. The pressure was expensive, even and relentless, the kind of water pressure that came from good plumbing and a hotel that charged four hundred dollars a night.
She shouldn’t be here. She knew that. She’d known it when she said fine, let’s go on the sidewalk, and she’d known it in the elevator, and she knew it now with her forehead against the tile and her body slowly unknotting under water she hadn’t paid for in a room that belonged to a man she’d met twice.
But the water was so fucking good. And her body needed it so badly that the wrongness of being here couldn’t compete with the relief of not hurting for the first time in hours.
She closed her eyes.
Isaac during the fire. That was the part she kept circling back to.
The alarm had gone off and while almost everyone else had panicked, he’d gone calm.
A woman had fallen near the auction tables and he’d been there in seconds, getting her up, steering her toward the exit.
A man trying to go back for something and Isaac had turned him around with a hand on his shoulder and a voice that left no room for argument.
He hadn’t been showing off. Hadn’t been performing for anyone. He’d just moved through the chaos like it was a problem to solve, methodical and calm.
The water ran over the back of her neck. She rotated her left shoulder, slow, testing the range. It moved. It hurt, but it moved. She did it again. The joint loosened by a degree.
She stayed in the shower longer than she should have. She knew that too. But the heat was pulling the tension out of her body one layer at a time, and every minute she spent in here was a minute she didn’t have to figure out what she was going to do when she walked back into that room.
Eventually she forced herself to turn the water off.
The bathroom was thick with steam. She dried off slowly, carefully, patting rather than rubbing, the way she’d learned to handle her skin years ago. The hotel robe was hanging on the back of the door, white and heavy, the kind of robe that felt like a reward for something.
She reached out, lightly running her hand down a sleeve. It felt soft, expensive. Releasing a deep breath, she looked at herself in the mirror.
Her makeup was gone. The version of herself she’d built for tonight—the darker brows, the sharp lip, the geometry she used to reshape her face from event to event—had dissolved in the sprinkler water and washed down the drain.
What was left was just her. It was part of the reason she’d agreed to come here with him. She hadn’t wanted to hang around au natural with hundreds of people recording fire chaos and more and more cops showing up. Too much of a chance she might get recorded.
She pushed her wet hair back from her face and held her own gaze. She cringed as she pulled her still damp dress back on, the feel of it already making her shiver. She took the fluffy robe off the door and pulled it on over her dress for warmth.
Now she had to leave the safety of the bathroom and go back into reality. No doubt the fairytale of Isaac was over.
He’d been a gentleman during the emergency. He’d been a gentleman on the sidewalk. He’d been a gentleman in the elevator.
But she had just showered in his hotel suite and there was a bed on the other side of that door, and it wasn’t difficult to figure out how the math in this situation worked. The nice room, the hot shower, the take your time—and then the moment she walked out, the shift. The look.
The expectation of tit for tat. She rolled her eyes at her own bad pun.
He’d have changed by now. Stripped out of the wet suit, maybe wrapped a towel around his waist, maybe not even that. Drink poured, two glasses, the bed turned down. Something casual that was meant to look unplanned.
That was okay. He was just a man after all. She’d thank him, decline whatever came next, and leave. If he didn’t like that answer, she truly did have a mini can of pepper spray in her dress pocket.
Taking a fortifying breath, she opened the bathroom door and walked out.
Isaac was standing by the window. Still in his wet shirt and trousers, his jacket draped over the desk chair where he’d left it, his hair damp against his forehead.
He hadn’t changed. Hadn’t opened any wine.
Hadn’t turned down the bed or dimmed the lights or moved to the couch or done any of the dozen small things that would have signaled he’d made himself casually available while she was behind a locked door.
He wasn’t close to the bed. He was as far from it as the room allowed, standing at the window with the harbor lights behind him and his ruined shoes still on his feet.
He turned, his eyes finding hers and staying there.
Something gave way inside her chest. A small structural failure, quiet and irreversible, like a pin pulling free from a hinge.
He was standing at the window in damp clothes because he hadn’t wanted her to walk out of this bathroom and see anything that made her feel like she owed him something.
“You didn’t change,” she said.
“Didn’t seem right.”
“You’re soaked.”
“I’ve been wetter.”
She almost laughed. “When?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Swimming.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, the robe bulky over the damp dress underneath.
The room was comfortable, the air dry and still after the steam of the bathroom.
The distance between them was maybe twelve feet, and he wasn’t closing it.
Wasn’t doing anything to make her inch her hand closer to the pepper spray.
“Thank you,” she said. “For this. The room, the shower. I needed it more than you know.”
“You don’t have to thank me.”
“I do, though. Because I’m about to leave. I even have my dress on under this robe. But I want you to know it’s not—” She stopped. Started again. “It’s not about you.”
He watched her. Those hazel eyes were dark gold in the glow from the window, and he was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t file into any category she recognized. Open and unhurried, like wherever she took this next, he’d meet her there.
“Okay,” he said.
One word. No argument. No push. Just the quiet acceptance of a man who’d offered what he had and was willing to let her walk away from it.
She didn’t move toward the door.
Her shoes were right there, beside the bathroom doorframe. Three steps, slip them on, drop the robe, say goodnight. She could be in the elevator in under a minute. A cab in five. Gone.
Her feet didn’t move.
“I had a plan,” she said. “I was going to come out here and say thank you and leave.”
“That sounds like a solid plan.”
“It was.” She pulled in a breath. “It is.”
“But?”
“But you’re standing at the window soaking wet, and you didn’t open the wine, and the bed is still made, and I—” She pressed her lips together. Started again. “No one does that.”
“Does what?”
“Gives someone a room and then stands as far from the bed as physically possible like they’re afraid of sending the wrong signal.”
“I wasn’t afraid. I just wanted you to have the space.”
“I know. That’s the problem.”
The silence between them was charged and full of something she couldn’t outrun.
She could feel it in her sternum, the pull, the specific gravity of this man and this room and the fact that he’d been standing at a window for thirty minutes in wet shoes because he cared more about what she felt than what he wanted.
She crossed the room.
Her dress shifted against her bare legs as she moved. His eyes tracked her but he didn’t step forward, didn’t reach for her, didn’t do anything except turn to face her fully as she closed the distance.
She stopped a foot away from him. Close enough to see the damp fabric of his shirt still clinging to his chest and shoulders.
“I should go,” she said.
“So you said.”
“I’m not going to.”
His breath left him. A quiet, controlled exhale, the first crack in the composure he’d been holding all night.
She rose up and kissed him.
There was no taste of bourbon on his mouth, no wine. Just him. His free hand settled against her jaw, his thumb along her cheekbone, and he kissed her back with a slowness that made her chest ache.
No rush. No urgency. Just his mouth on hers, thorough and deliberate, like he’d been thinking about how to do this since the first song on the first dance floor and had decided to take his time.
She pulled back just far enough to breathe. “You’re still in wet clothes.”
“I am.”
“That seems like a problem.”
His mouth curved against hers. “It might be.”
“How about a shower for the both of us?” She took his hand and pulled him toward the bathroom.
The steam had mostly cleared, but the mirror was still fogged and the tile held the lingering heat under her bare feet.
She reached into the shower and turned the water on.
It came up hot almost immediately—you had to love expensive hotels.